Giant

I stumbled upon a book fair today. These things happen: you never know when you're going to trip over one that someone has left lying around. This was in Buxton; and I should have known, because it's the sort of thing that can happen to you in Buxton if you're not careful. I'm not really into antique fairs and craft fairs and the like, and tend to avoid them as a rule; but books - particularly old books - have a certain allure that is hard to resist. So I had a quick look around at the various stalls piled haphazardly with volumes ranging from the almost brand new to the really quite old.

Although I have browsed through second-hand bookshops since I was a callow youth (and I was pretty callow in my day), and have a modest collection at home of my favourite out-of-print authors, I must say I am beginning to have mixed feelings about them. Although I like the look and feel and whiff of old books, I don't know if I prefer a nice clean untouched paperback.  (Which will look practically as nice and clean and untouched after I have finished reading it as when I bought it.) And similarly, when I come upon a literary classic which I have always fancied reading but never quite got around to, I stop and think how I might actually prefer to read it in a modern edition, bolstered by contemporary scholarship and with a thick wadge of notes at the back. But maybe what exasperates me, though partly beguiles me at the same time, is the sheer obscurity of so many of the books: volumes on such esoteric subjects that you wonder who will ever want to buy them nowadays, and are they fated to be left on shelves ignored for years to come. Presumably someone has an interest in these things, and I suppose the books I buy would seem similarly obscure, but it makes you feel that it is a world that is slipping quietly away, particularly in a marketplace being re-shaped by e-books and Amazon and the internet. And then it makes you wonder about this modern age we live in, full of its own best-sellers and blogs: is all of that fated to become similarly obscure and irrelevant?

Talking of worlds slipping away, it is sad to note the passing of Neil Armstrong yesterday; an icon from my earliest memories; who, for all his modesty, seems a more significant figure of the 20th century than many.